Breast cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer in women. The mortality reported due to breast cancer is increasing at a frightening rate across the globe. Progression of cancer starts from pre-malignant to malignant to metastatic disease which causes death of the patient. There are various modalities used in the detection of these cancers they are X-ray, CT scans, MRI scans, PET, Ultra sound and the like. But, these imaging modalities are difficult to interpret breast cancer lesion, as it gets shadowed by the denser tissues, especially when the breast density is high. Unfortunately, by the time cancer metastasis becomes clinically evident with today's imaging techniques, the metastatic disease gets progressed to late stage prohibiting early successful interventions such as surgery or radiations.
Most of the cancers in women are hormone dependent, the cancerous cells grow by feeding on the hormone, Estrogen. Estrogen stimulates breast cancer cell growth, in the same manner it is responsible for cell growth and division in breast cells. As Estrogen remains a central factor in stimulating breast cancer cell growth, designing new therapeutic strategies to block estrogen stimulation of breast cancer cell growth is important to control the cancer cell growth.
Mammography or other X-Ray methods are currently in widespread use for the detection of breast cancers. The ionizing radiation properties of the X-rays used during the mammogram comes with a risk of having a breast tumor. Additionally, 5-25 percent of malignant breast cancer goes undetected with mammogram and this method is not capable of determining whether the tumor is benign or malignant.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,543,933 discloses a microwave thermography apparatus but it doesn't achieve adequate depth of penetration and the required resolution, except for large cancers. Thus, the small cancer lesions will be undetected.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,588,032 discloses an Apparatus and method for imaging with wave fields using inverse scattering techniques to detect cancer by computational matrix method but the results are vague and cannot be completely relied on for treatment of the patients.
Centimeter- and Millimeter-Wave Thermography—A Survey on Tumour Detection, J. Edrich, p 95-104, states a method, where, the radiometry involved remote sensing by focussed apertures like lenses or reflectors that focus the cm or mm wave into a horn antenna mounted on a scanner, but wavelength of higher frequencies are preferred which have decreased penetration, thus it cannot give clear results due to thick density of tissue.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,677,125 discloses a method for detecting differential expression of marker gene in DCIS (ductal carcinoma situ) pre-invasive cancerous breast tissue. This method could have been desirable but there no detailed study on the function of novel sequences identified. The melanoma and breast cancer markers cannot detect breast cancer with high specificity and sensitively. This is because tumor cells exhibit wide phenotypic diversity during disease progression.
US20070292352 discloses the use of cyanine dyes, but cyanine are not stable in the presence of ammonium hydroxide, dithiothreitol (DTT), primary and secondary amines, and ammonium persulfate (APS) which is commonly used in bioassays. Also, the free dyes used have a poor tumor selectivity.
Considering the importance of detection of cancer cells and challenges associated with current methodologies, it is imperative to develop compounds and techniques which can be adopted in a facile manner and detect cancer cells cost effectively. Since early detection is the key to arrest breast cancer cell growth. The present invention is also related to effective and early detection of breast cancer cells.